shift accordingly: instead of setting out to discover the “American” characteristics that generated a literature, we would look for the moment when a U.S. nationalist cultural attitude first defined an abjected norm, and, in that very same process, defined itself as the exception. What we thus discover is that the claim of cisatlantic literary originality itself has an irreducibly transatlantic source. “To be sure of what they were,” as Terence Martin puts it, Americans “converted a European tradition to their own use and proclaimed (with developing conviction) what they were not.”33 The case I consider in Chapter 2 furnishes a particularly concrete example, for this was precisely what Crèvecoeur did when he used a (fictional) learned British correspondent as a transatlantic foil for that of his “simple [American] farmer” (Letters, 49). So, too, by having Farmer James describe his own writing almost exclusively through grammatical privatives (“However incorrect my style, however inexpert my methods” [49]), Crèvecoeur signaled that the style of his “simple farmer” had to be negatively derived, as it were, from a putatively British norm. New stereotypes of “American” identity, language, and literature began to emerge at this historical moment, some of which may still have cultural traction for us; yet we have systematically, perhaps willfully, forgotten the gesture of negative definition which first gave rise to them.
The Anglophobia Thesis
As I hope is already becoming clear, I mean by all this something quite different from the familiar idea of a “cultural declaration of independence” from Britain which was supposed to complete the act of political separation in literary or artistic terms.34 Literary history has made a cliche of the independence trope, but, slogans aside, post-Revolutionary literary culture was shaped more profoundly by the realities of transatlantic exchange than by the desire for national isolation.35 If we feel compelled for some reason to nominate a founding political document as a symbol of this literary culture, why not, at least as a thought experiment, consider alternative candidates? Take the Treaty of Paris, for example.36 After all, nearly all of what we have canonized as U.S. literature is not just “post-Revolutionary,” but “post–Treaty of Paris” as well—less sonorous, but not less true. The treaty, which in 1783 marked the formal commencement of international relations between the United States and Britain as sovereign states and trade partners, used a different sort of performative language than its famous declaring cousin: in it the United States of America “treat[ed] with”37 the British crown to recover “the good Correspondence and Friendship which they mutually wish to restore, and to establish such a beneficial and satisfactory intercourse, between the two countries upon the ground of reciprocal advantages and mutual convenience.”38 The “perpetual Peace and Harmony” thus restored—whose language anticipated the cosmopolitan vision of Immanuel Kant’s “Toward Perpetual Peace” essay a decade later—was to be political, cultural, and not least, economic, reconnecting the circuits of communication and commerce “unhappily interrupted” by the Revolution, rejoining a formerly severed transatlantic tie.39 A declaration of interdependence: how different would American literary history look with that as its governing statement?40
The question is rhetorical, but it should help to explain a peculiar feature of Literature, American Style: my object of study is the aspiration toward national originality, but my methodology and angle of approach are entwined with a recent wave of scholarship that has radically questioned that very idea. Clearly, an alternative paradigm has been emerging in early American studies, one which signals a general change in the status of the nation as an organizing concept.41 But I want to describe it in rather more specific terms than that of a “transnational turn” in order to focus more narrowly on its revision of our assumptions about how anglophone Americans apprehended their relationship to Britain.42 To put a fine point on it, I will term the older common sense the “Anglophobia thesis,” for it proceeded from the premise that U.S. culture was born out an intense desire to cut itself off from Britain. For the sake of parallelism, we can call the revisionary paradigm the “Anglophilia thesis,” partly to indicate its kinship with the “Anglicization” argument in political and social history, but also in a nod to Elisa Tamarkin’s 2008 book, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America. At issue is whether, as Cold War–era cultural histories tended to assume, the new nation immediately began to distance itself from all that is British, or whether, as scholars have recently begun to suggest, Britain still remained a model for cultural definition in the Revolutionary and early national periods and beyond. Rather than capitulating to the commonsense assumption that the Revolution was the accomplishment of a long-standing desire to be separate from Britain—and that the most important cultural products were those that first produced that revolutionary ideology and then sustained the new nation-state—recent scholarship has instead emphasized the complex exchange of political ideas, literary forms, and ideas about group identity and cultural reproduction that began long before, and continued long after, formal political independence. We can see the new emphasis rather clearly in social and political histories of the period. According to the strain of historiography associated with John Murrin, T. H. Breen, Jack Greene, and others, Anglo-Americans were increasingly insistent throughout the colonial period not on increasing or even maintaining their social distance from Britain, but in fact on replicating its institutions and its forms of consumption.43 Murrin’s term for this process, Anglicization, best expresses the paradoxical nature of U.S. national identity as it emerged over the course of the eighteenth century: to the extent that Anglo-Americans did experience a growing sense of political cohesion during this period, “Britain had been the major focus of unity and the engine of change.”44 On this account, the Revolution itself was “the culminating moment in the process of Anglicization”45 rather than an inevitable becoming-American of a settler culture.
Literary historians, arguing along comparable lines, have begun to refigure our understanding of transatlantic literary relations precisely by questioning the assumption “that different national governments mean different national literatures,” as Leonard Tennenhouse put it. In his 2007 book, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850, Tennenhouse gives us an entirely different explanatory model for transatlantic cultural relations at the end of the eighteenth century than the reflexive oedipal narrative according to which a new national identity was “born” and then naturally grew up to assert its maturity and independence.46 Instead, he takes the counterintuitive line that early U.S. culture is nothing more nor less than a branch of a British diaspora, that is, an explicit attempt to reproduce the characteristic elements of English culture outside of England itself.47 Tamarkin’s Anglophilia, published the following year, deploys a different category to do comparable work (though the fact that one of her sections is entitled “The Importance of Being English” is an immediate indication that she and Tennenhouse were independently thinking along similar lines).48 If Tamarkin rounded out the national picture by reaccentuating a tradition of American Anglophilia central to the antebellum period, recent work by Edward Larkin and Philip Gould recovers the critical role of loyalist voices in early U.S. culture-formation.49 Taken together, we might say, all this work tends to find something like “Anglicization” precisely where we have been trained to look for “Americanization.”50
Now, since much of this scholarship questions the self-evidence of the nation as a category of cultural analysis, thus unseating the exceptionalist premises that dominated Cold War–era literary scholarship, it may at first seem an uncomfortable entryway into my inquiry, if not to obviate my question entirely. Yet Literature, American Style is born from the conviction that these disciplinary turns and methodological revisions provide the perfect opportunity to reconsider the old question of “our national literature” in a fresh way. To do so is not perversely to redraw the borders around U.S. literature at the very moment transatlantic, hemispheric, and global approaches are rendering them permeable and subsuming the nation into larger geocultural units.51 Rather, as I hinted at the outset, it is to return to the early national history of our academic present. In this way, my project is motivated more by
